How it should've gone
by J.D Killian
Summary: This is, of course, personal preference. But it'd cover all the bases nicely.


She seemed to glide through the halls, until they found themselves staring at a door the red of a fire axe. Dante looked at it, before a sudden sound, like a blade through the air, caught his attention from behind. A haunting moan filled the room at about the same time, and he knew that both the door ahead and the path behind were closed off with those red barriers. Leah was nowhere to be found, to no great surprise. Dante turned, then adjusted the action into a wild duck as he noticed the scythe headed for his face.

Scythe passed, he rose, pushing the shotgun straight into the attacking demon's face. A pull of the trigger and it staggered back, apparently unharmed. Dante reached forward and pumped the action, releasing another shot, followed by third, fourth, and a fifth, each pure demonic energy. The thing stumbled back with each shot, even though it showed no damage. Dante gripped the shotgun by the pump, and pulled Alastor forward, slicing through the demon, then followed up with a rapid chain of horizontal slashes. It staggered away from this onslaught in full, weakened, before falling to the ground with a follow thump, it's gangly sand-colored body dissolving into a pile of, fittingly, sand. Apparently, he had just killed Death.

Until six more of them just slashed their way out the walls, not actually destroying anything physical but seeming to melt free of the material. Dante just glared hard at them, adjusting his grip on Alastor.

"Only six?"

He dashed toward the closest, extending the blade in a stab, and ran it through, before shifting immediately into a ragged, rapid series of thrusts at various body parts. The demon couldn't stand up to the onslaught, and fell away into sand before the combo was finished. Dante turned to the next, hurled the sword at it's chest, and dashed past it. The third demon stood behind, and Dante delivered a sudden roundhouse kick, sending that demon at the sword sticking out of the back of the second. He trained both pistols on the encroaching fourth scythe-wielder, and unleashed a hailstorm of bullets, tearing away chunks of it's sand-based form with each shot. Dante turned and kicked the feet out from under the closer of the two demons impaled on Alastor, causing it to fall forward. The fall took the other demon with it, destroying both.

With four demons defeated, Dante recovered Alastor. Sword in hand, he turned to where the other two were supposed to be, and found only Leah, shrouded in a swarm of what appeared to be two-dimensional bats. Looking at her like that made him uneasy, but he could not place why. The red barriers shattered, and Leah gestured to the door.

"After you, pretty-boy." To which Dante just shrugged, and kicked the door off it's hinges.

Behind was a stairwell, a decidedly normal one. It lead only up, though, and natural light seemed to seep in from the top. Dante headed up, and found himself, surprisingly, unmolested and unblocked all the way to the roof. He stepped out into natural light, on what appeared to be a normal city roof, and found himself almost blinded at how bright the sun was. He could smell seawater coming in off the ocean, which meant that wasn't far out, and freshly cut grass. As his eyes adjusted, he found that he was standing in an improvised roof garden. A single man in the same garb as the other doctors stood alone, glancing at Dante. The man had something slung across his chest, under the lab coat, and shaggy blonde hair. The man crossed his arms across his chest, and pulled out two large, ornate pistols, one red and one silver.

Dante gave him a look that seemed to ask, seriously, if he was full of shit or just going to return the guns. The Silvery-white Anelie, and the blood-crimson Eleonore. Each were wickedly curved, not resembling any other firearm on the planet, and each fired bullets that no mortal man could fire one-handed. Those were Dante's guns, and he was certain of it.

"Return those." He didn't need to threaten the man. He'd kill him one way or another. The man just grinned, as if the whole escape attempt were a joke.  
"You think you can talk to me like that, half-breed? You don't scare me." He gestured with the guns, and several lesser demons, more of the Doctors, seemed to just appear. A barrier formed around Dante and the doctors, keeping him from approaching the man with his guns. Dante looked back over his shoulder, and Leah was also outside the circle. Hilarious, he thought, as she just gave a helpless, teasing shrug.

Dante turned his attention back to the macabre doctors, taking in their less-than-human features, and quickly opened fire with the two stolen hand-guns. Remembering the way his own guns felt in his hand, these just felt pathetically weak by comparison. Each bullet still hit it's mark, and after a scant dozen, each of the doctors was in a heap on the ground. With that, the barrier fell. Dante shrugged, shaking his head.

"Return my guns, and I'll make it quick." Dante said simply, letting a bullet from the heavier gun in his right hand punctuate it, taking a small chunk off the head Doctor's ear. To nobody's surprise, it did not bleed.  
"Foolish boy, why don't you try and take them?" His voice grew monstrous, and his face began to resemble bone, bare of the weight of mortal flesh.

The hammering sound of two oversized guns filled the air as the demon started firing at Dante, and the young man fired back, shooting each bullet off it's collision course. He couldn't stop the bullets dead with much weaker guns, but he could deflect them. The Demon Doctor stopped firing, and Dante took the opportunity to move closer in one sudden burst. He gripped Alastor, and readied himself. As he got closer, the Doctor didn't do anything but let his eyes glint with excitement, then suddenly started pulling the triggers again. Dante had already expected this, and ducked down and to his left, bringing the blade out wildly to his side, slashing at the Head Doctor's exposed and very vulnerable-looking forearms.

The whole gambit, absurd as it was, worked perfectly, and the two guns stopped firing. Dead hands and oversized guns fell to the ground, and Dante turned the blade in such a way to swing at the midsection of the Doctor. Instead of taking the hit, the full-blooded demon jumped away, and glared at his missing arms, crimson energy peeling off in curls like smoke. Dante straightened out, then walked over to recover each of his guns, one by one, giving no sort of dignity to the arms clutching them. He checked the guns for scratches, then aimed them both at the Skull-faced demon.

"This is the part where you beg for your life." He said simply, and the demon looked at him like he was crazy.

Bones began to grow back at the ends of the stumps of his arms, large and not remotely human. Ghastly claws, gnarled and curved in distressing ways. Slowly, the rest of the Doctor tore in an approximation to fake flesh, looking like a skin suit over a too-alive skeleton. Then the Skeleton itself mutated, growing too many non-human limbs, both arms and legs, and what little human-shape it retained was gone. It was, at it's core, a mass of boiling crimson fluid-like energy, protected by a cage of bone. The semi-humanoid skeletal face and the massive mantis-like scythes gave it a look that Dante could only describe as demonic.

"I hate it when they fight back." Dante aimed in the thing's general direction, and started shooting. He figured even if the shots didn't do damage, they'd lure the thing closer, which was exactly what he wanted. Once the thing started moving closer, Dante did the same, firing off rounds at fixed intervals. The closer it got, the more sure he was that the rounds were, really, doing damage. Little chips of bone flew off with each shot, and he figured eventually the bullets would clear a hole to the thing's pulsing core of dark energy.

Of course, he didn't have the patience to wait for that, so when the thing whipped one of those bone blades at him, he flipped over it, and sliced it away at the joint with Alastor in mid-air. He landed in a crouch, blade held high and back, electricity crackling along the blade. The young man looked up at the devil, before standing, spinning, and hurling the blade straight at the thing's chest. It connected, driving itself into the thing's chest. Dante jumped up after the sword, narrowly avoiding a second slash with from the devil's other blade.

Dante kicked the pommel of the blade, driving it deeper in, and the crunch of destroyed bone made even he a little sick. But the Demon fell to the floor in a sudden heap, barely able to hold itself up on it's one good arm. It turned empty eye sockets on Dante, and began to speak it's last words.

"I am but he least of Mundus' forces, Half-breed. He is watching you, always." Dante didn't particularly want to hear any more of the skeleton's yammerings, so he put three bullets into the thing's head before it could think of something else to say that he didn't care to hear.


End file.
